


Injured? Good.

by Scarfinator



Category: Tales of Berseria, Tales of Series
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-11 01:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15304272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scarfinator/pseuds/Scarfinator
Summary: After hearing from Rokurou about a powerful daemon roaming the outside of town, Eizen decides to take a gamble and go fight it on his own. He pays the price dearly through taking a heavy beating. While he survives and will recover quickly, Velvet now has to deal with the emotional fallout of having been forced to watch her lover be beaten nearly to death in front of her.She can only hope that he learned his lesson through the injuries he sustained.





	Injured? Good.

Velvet retracted her sword from her opponent, seething and her breath heaving with enough venom to put the berserk daemon she just killed to shame. She wasn’t quite sure what sort of daemon it technically was, but it was for all intents and purposes a gigantic ape. Either way, she’d finished it off with about twenty more slashes than necessary, but hell if she was keeping exact count.

To put a fitting end to her burst of bloodthirst, she engorged her daemon arm and fed off the monster’s remains. It was then that she noticed another, smaller daemon approaching her fallen lover where he lay a short distance behind her. It was a small fry, especially in comparison to the brute they had just fought, but nothing she wanted him to deal with in the slightest while he was in that condition.

She chucked the near devoured daemon carcass aside and rushed to where Eizen lay. Even in his battered daze he was still trying to get up and fight, she noticed. Instead of comforting her, it only made her more upset.

Rokurou’s excited boasts about how strong the daemon terrorizing the roads was said to be replayed through Velvet’s head. She cursed the other man for having brought it up in the first place; his brawn before brains attitude was absolutely infectious to Eizen and he knew it.

Why did Eizen never know when to give up? That was the same bullheadedness that had gotten him into this mess to begin with.

“Stay down!” she screamed down at him. Without even taking her eyes off Eizen, she ran the daemon through with her sword. Finally, she had cleared the last of his assailants from the battlefield.

Velvet glanced at the small daemon just long enough to ascertain that she killed it. After confirming its death, she immediately whipped her head back to face Eizen. She took a deep breath to compose herself, and crouched down to get on eye level with him.

That deep breath did her absolutely no good; before either of them realized what was going on, she yanked him upright and began to shriek at him.

“Did you have _any_ idea whatsoever what you were getting yourself into by going after this thing?!”

He said nothing in response. As cold comfort to Velvet, he was still well conscious enough to register what was happening. Although he offered no words, and although he was clearly dazed, his glance aside and the way he grit his teeth served as an answer of its own.

“Centuries of learning to cope with your curse should have taught you better than this!” Velvet continued. “If you had you gotten yourself killed after all, you would have deserved it! But the people who care about you wouldn’t have. Ever thought of that?! Ever thought of what they’d think if that ape had smashed your skull into the pavement after all?!?!”

No response from Eizen was offered there either. Just that continued dazed stare. Not quite blank because it was obvious he was trying to hold onto consciousness, but indicative that he had just been horrifically beaten nonetheless.

Velvet pulled him into an embrace. She had decided she didn’t want to have to look at his face any longer.

“I can tell you what I’d think!” She sobbed over his shoulder. “I would have had the man that I love taken from me, with nothing I could have done! Just as I had finally accepted you into my life the way I wanted, you would have been gone. Just like everyone else I’ve ever cared about.“

At this point she felt Eizen’s arms weakly move up to return her embrace, which only pushed her over the edge to outright cry over him even further.

Before she lost all coherency to her tears, there was one important thing she had to say to him.

“You really don’t have any idea just how much I love you, do you?!”

Whatever she had yelled after that, most the exact words didn’t clearly register in her mind; she just kept hysterically crying on his shoulder. It wasn’t uncontrolled; she at least had enough dignity left in her to hold back what she could. But her cries were still perfectly audible and her panic clear as day.

 

* * *

 

Hours later, Velvet strode into Eizen’s inn room and looked over him in disgust where he slept in the bed. He fell asleep long after they got back, but finally having a chance to give him a good glare while she was more lucid and could savor her expression of contempt was incredibly satisfying. Didn’t matter if he could see it; she’d get to that part later.

Her panic over seeing Eizen so badly beaten had long passed. Whenever he decided to wake up, Velvet would be capable of reacting to his plight with far more dignity than she had mustered just mere hours before.

What the bastard needed was less her hysterically screaming at him through tears for his recklessness, and more a firm scolding. Still vicious, but with far less crying on her part.

She narrowed her eyes at him, scanning over his swollen, bandaged face. As soon as they got themselves back to the inn, Laphicet and Eleanor had attended to him. He went to sleep as soon as they were done. Apparently sleep was one method in which malakhim could heal themselves; Velvet had always wondered why they even had the capability to sleep if it wasn’t necessary for them to.

 _'He really has been asleep for way too long though…'_ Velvet inched closer to him. But not close enough to wake him up, she hoped. She realized she would not get to talk to him in good conscience for quite some time if she wanted him to recover quickly. But she still wanted to get just close enough to get a better look at his sorry mug.

At the very least, she took solace in his peaceful rest. While she was angry at him for charging into a near death experience, she would not have taken pleasure in his extended suffering. All she wanted was for him to have to stay put in that bed for a good while; maybe that would teach him that sometimes you really can’t just go do whatever the hell you want. Melodramatic pirate creeds be damned.

At that point, Velvet decided she had her fill. Any further staring would be mere voyeurism; she came with no intentions of waking him up, and she knew he would wake up sooner or later without her help. Thus, she had no reason to dote at his bedside. And she would not indulge the man any more than she needed to at this time.

“That was a quick visit.”

Velvet jolted from her place in front of the door and whipped around to face Eizen. He truly was incapable of making anything simple for her. Even though Velvet started the countdown to when Eizen would address her as soon as she turned away from him to walk out of the room, he had still interjected into her thoughts before she could even reach “one”.

“Seems even being beaten half to death didn’t make you any less of a light sleeper,” she growled.

Eizen smiled in the face of her death glare. “No one could possibly stay asleep while you’re here. The contempt you’re giving off is strong enough for even the dead to pick up on."

“Good. That means I’m doing my job.” Velvet walked back to his bed to sit by him on the side. She prepared to say something along the lines of ‘have you learned your lesson?’, but something about seeing him both injured and this time awake softened her irritation. Enough of his face had come out intact to let him speak normally—most of the damage had been to the rest of his body—but it was easy enough to tell he had been through a nasty fight.

While she was upset with him, the reason for her anger was because he had almost gotten himself killed. All because he got cocky and thought the daemon was something he could have handled on his own.

She averted her eyes slightly as she prepared what she was going to say next. Velvet did not want to actually see him in pain.

Eizen had his moments of incredible stupidity too, but this was more along the lines of what she expected from Rokurou. Not the man keeping Aifread’s Pirates together in his absence, whose worst intellectual offenses thus far had been those two times he ran off after Zaveid and a few instances where she witnessed him nearly blow the pirates’ budget at an auction on some odd-looking artifact.

He was no doubt bullheaded. But at his core, Eizen was not a stupid man at all.

Velvet turned back to him. “…Are you doing alright now?” she finally asked.

“About as good as you’d expect,” Eizen shrugged. “You saw me back there; I won’t be coming back from that right away.”

“ _Good,_ ” Velvet said. As the declaration left her mouth, she detected just a hint of surprise from Eizen laying at her side. It wasn’t much; the man had nerves of steel, after all. But it did make Velvet realize her tone came off stronger than she had intended.

Her thoughts raced for a moment as she tried to find a way to backpedal. “Or, well… It’s not good you’re stuck here, but—”

“I like what you said before just fine,” Eizen interjected. “That sort of bluntness suits you far more than whatever you were trying to do just now. You don’t need to save face when you were right the first time.”

Velvet stared him over. “So you’ve at least figured out this is your fault?”

“Aye,” he said back to her. “I don’t know what I expected from going alone to fight a daemon with that big of a bounty on its head. Rokurou’s excitement over hearing about it must have gotten to my head. All I know is that before I knew it, I was after its head; consequences be damned.“

“So in other words, you got caught up in a foolish man’s fantasy of power and glory, and wanted to see if you couldn’t fell the beast before Rokurou could.“

Eizen laughed weakly. “Hit it right on the head.”

Velvet groaned. “Then you can sit there as long as it takes you to heal up. You heard Eleanor; don’t go stomping around the inn until tomorrow morning at the earliest. And…“ she smiled slightly and paused for a moment. “I’m glad you’re doing alright.”

No immediate response from Eizen other than a small smile of his own. Velvet waited for a moment to see if he had anything else for her, and was about to excuse herself when she heard him mumble something else.

“I’m sorry.”

Her face lit up in immediate confusion. Had she heard him right? Was Eizen… apologizing to her over this mess?

“What?” Velvet needed to confirm right that moment if she had heard him right or not.

“You heard me,” Eizen said. “And believe me, I heard every word you had to say to me after saving me in that fight.”

Velvet’s face went hot, and her features felt numb. That display was not something she had wanted him to recall.

Eizen completely ignored her embarrassment and continued. “I’ve been thinking the most about that part where you told me I didn’t realize how much I mean to you. How much you love me. And…“

“Was I right?” Velvet raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, I knew alright. But I didn’t take it to heart. When I ran into that fight, thinking about how you might react—how everyone else might react—if didn’t come out on top. That wasn’t even in my mind until the moment you stormed over to yell at me. I didn’t think about how much I must have worried you when you first charged in to take out the daemon for me.”

He sighed, and then smiled at her. “Guess I really was out of my mind today, huh?”

“You were,” Velvet immediately chided.

“At least you’ve finally stopped beating around the bush. Good; that’s the Velvet I wanted to wake up to.” Eizen sat up; the first major movement he had made during the entire visit. “The Velvet I love is a Velvet that doesn’t let me get away with my bullshi—”

His breath cut short and his eyes widened. Realizing that it was most likely because he had sat up so suddenly, Velvet immediately helped him lay back down as he gasped for air.

“Don’t do that!” she hissed. As he regained his composure, she bit her lip and took a long moment to narrow her eyes at him.

“…I don’t know how you could have possibly expected me to see that coming,” Eizen finally said. “I did nothing but sit up, and it wasn’t even that—Ungh?!”

While he was talking, Velvet had climbed onto his bed to straddle him. His already impaired vision could now only perceive Velvet’s face as she slowly started to close the distance between their lips.

“Is this any way to treat the injured?”

“It absolutely is,” Velvet answered. “Think of it this way—if I come to you, you won’t have to sit up. I can give us a bit of entertainment without you having to lift a muscle.”

Eizen groaned in mock defeat. “Well, I can’t complain then. Just don’t expect much from me.”

Velvet chuckled just a bit to herself before bringing her lips to his. The one and only thing she had to thank that daemon for was staying the hell away from her lover’s mouth. He would have no doubt hated to not be able to run it for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea if there's been any canonical statements on what sleeping actually does for malakhim/seraphim, btw! That was an entirely fanon invention of mine aha (but imo it would make a ton of sense)
> 
> Anyway EiVel snatched my wig around mid-February this year (it was when the Eizen and Phi event dropped in Global Rays (meaning I got to read the translation of its contents... good stuff, made me outright start shipping EiVel!)) but I haven't even completed any shipping works for them yet. I've sketched a bunch of fanart for them, but none ever got completed.
> 
> BUT now we have this one shot so problem solved! You've got an EiVel fic.
> 
> I actually really wanted to write something a bit more... Steamy for them. Almost ended the fic with a makeout session too before I decided it'd be too tonally inconsistent with what I had written before it. But I chickened out because I have no experience with writing that kinda stuff at all (at least no such writing that's actually meant to arouse the reader)
> 
> Now to work on my stuff for the Tales of Femslash Week over on Tumblr this year. I'm running the dang thing yet here I am on the first day finishing up a fic for my hets instead smdh


End file.
